When tagging baseball fields, the “dirt” of the infield (and warning track where applicable) is not dirt, and it is closer to sand. I discussed how to tag this with @pkoby a few days ago and no consensus was reached; See changeset 179772556 where I made most of my points about this already. Professional baseball fields are tagged natural=sand + surface=dirt so is that the common practice of tagging dirt/sand infields?
Different perspective: playgrounds are often sandy yet we don’t tag natural=sand and other pitches, except when they are set at beaches where there is indeed natural sand, are tagged with surface.
So from where I stand I wouldn’t use the natural tag for a baseball pitch.
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My opinion is that natural=sand on a baseball infield is a common case of mis-tagging for a renderer, since it makes them pop out nicely in a brown color in renderers. But they aren’t the same at all as sand dunes. In fact the sand wiki page explicitly discourages this mapping. At best it’s a pitch with surface=sand, but i’d probably use surface=dirt myself. Proposal:Tag:baseball=infield - OpenStreetMap Wiki has some usage, even though it was never approved, I’d suggest using that instead.
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I meant to follow up on the changeset, but I’ll add it here. In terms of “commonly used”, sport=baseball | Tags | OpenStreetMap Taginfo shows that 7.44% of sport=baseball have any surface tag, and 5.19% have surface=grass, so that means that ≤2.25% have surface=sand (probably less that 0.69%, because TagInfo isn’t showing surface=sand above that level).
Agreed that it was declared and should still be considered tagging for the renderer, but that hasn’t prevented people from using it. Professional stadiums (at least 1, 2) have natural=sand and surface=dirt and according to my source in the changeset, these fields have ~15% less sand content than the nonprofessional fields. I suppose baseball=infield is the right tag, but it needs to gain traction/recognition before it is worth anything. There is no structure in place to prevent or try to get people away from tagging for the renderer in this instance, because there is no better known alternative.
The main way I believe these fields are tagged is a separate polygon/multipolygon of natural=sand and the way I think it’s done best (under the prerequisite that natural=sand is the tag to be used) is to tag the baseball field as a whole as surface=grass and add a natural=sand multipolygon where the sand and infield grass are, and if the infield is dirt/sand entirely, I make a single polygon where the sand is. I figure a new tag along similar lines of baseball=infield to tag the mixture of sand, dirt, and other material that makes up the baseball diamond is necessary to solve this problem. Therefore if a mechanical edit is made to anywhere inside of a pitch with sport=baseball, the natural=sand is changed to what the baseball infield tag is to be.
As has been stated before: there is no natural=sand there. There may be surface=sand and most examples with natural are very likely tagging for the renderer
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Please use surface=*, as it is stated in the leisure=pitch wiki and the sport=baseball wiki.
But is it even sand? Tennis courts are about the same (reddish firm dirt), they are tagged with surface=clay.
I have agreed that it is used as tagging for the renderer, but my point is that it is widely used to tag these infields because there is no well known alternative that is the same or more accurate in terms of basic mapping, disregarding the wiki. Therefore there is no way to prevent these fields to continue popping up wherever people feel like mapping them, unless there is a new tag that gains traction to properly describe an infield.
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According to https://www.mccrone.com/mm/a-closer-look-at-baseball-infield-sand/ :
“For a typical, or so-called low-maintenance, nonprofessional infield, the components consist of a mix of 70 percent sand, 15 percent clay, and 15 percent silt. For Major League Baseball, the infield mix is a bit different: 55 percent sand, 30 percent clay, and 15 percent silt.”
The warning track might be different, I am not sure.
We should find consistent tagging without need of specialist analysis of the sand mixture. It is more important how it is called by non specialists.
In German (my first language) on tennis courts, we call it “Tennissand”, we map it surface=clay and actually it is broken red bricks or roof tiles.
Ok. I believe the tagging should not relate to what the word used to call it, rather it should be what it is made of. If clay makes red bricks, it makes sense that disassembled bricks can be tagged as clay. And if most of the material in baseball “dirt” is sand, it makes sense (to people who don’t read the wiki or disregard it) to be tagged as such.
The best way to go about it is to tag it with baseball=infield, but if tagging for the renderer, which is a common enough practice we can’t stop by using a single tag. If the proposal that was abandoned gets enough traction to be approved, it’d be worth it for the people who do tag it for the renderer to switch to the baseball=infield tag, as carto would render the infield the same color according to the proposal.
We can stop tagging for the renderer. Don’t do it yourself, and fix it if you come across it. This is a community, and that’s how mistakes are resolved.
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This shows about 125 instances of polygons of natural=sand connected to or inside of polygons with sport= baseball, inside of Pennsylvania. Would this be a good concept to turn into a MapRoulette type challenge?
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